On Tuesday, Iowa’s Attorney General Tom Miller testified to the Senate Banking Committee it would be months before the combined AG “investigation” came up with a settlement. That’s almost exactly the moment when the Washington Post posted a story reporting the AGs were close to a settlement.

I think it’s important to recognize that “the White House” is not a monolith. There are sometimes counteracting forces there, and one aide may not know what the other aide is pushing. Increasingly the internecine fights get aired out in public, though typically anonymously. That’s the best way to read this denial of the plan I mentioned yesterday, to make Elizabeth Warren the interim director of the Consumer Financial Protection Agency.

Call me crazy, but I don’t think Chris Dodd’s newfound concern about management experience stems from either the recognition that his past confirmation negligence led to failures at (in particular) SEC and OTS or his genuine concern that the CFPB wouldn’t effectively protect consumers’ interests if it were led by Elizabeth Warren.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi just announced that she would call the House back into a rare August session “early next week” to get final passage on the state fiscal aid bill, which cleared a Senate cloture vote earlier today. This would ensure that states got the funding for their Medicaid and education programs without having to wait an additional month

Republicans Troske and McWatters made the key point, that Warren is seemingly being avoided for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau job because as someone conducting oversight of TARP, she was critical of the Treasury Department who was implementing it.